A ~S~ most important tool is without a doubt his browser, nearly all other tools are used in order to complement it.
So we will try to optimize the way we use (or abuse) our browser by teaching it some new tricks.

We could start by reversing the guts out of it but this hardly the most optimal way. For one this method isn't browser independant, isn't easy to maintain and adapt for new tools and not all of us are fluently speaking machinecode.

The main way we 'actually' communicate with our browser, is when we use the 'addressbar'. Trough there we can tell it everything, but like an old dog it only responds to the tricks it already knows. Imagine what could happen if we used something like the following code as a bookmarklet to grab data from a page (in this case the current url), convert it into a command and pass it along the address bar for the browser to obey.

Of cource a command like: "fetch http://www.searchlores.org/cinix_run.htm and open with sourcerer" is a bit on the demanding side, but if we base our new trick on some of the older tricks our browser already knows, I'm sure we will find a workable solution.

There is only one main rule: the tool we wish to command from our browser needs to support commandline arguments.[1]

Solution 1A custom protocol handler

I'm sure you all have seen links starting with sig2dat://, ed2k://, copernic://, ... these are all custom protocol handlers installed together with applications that wander the net: desktop based search engines, P2P appz,...
We could in fact create our own custom protocol handler to launch an application like sourcerer.[2]

Running a web server locally is in my opinion a better way to go. You can start it up (when you need it) and shut it down (when you don't) without much effort and is easy to adapt, expand and customize.

I couldn't get this solution to work on my Win XP due to user security rights and/or other issues. (let me know if you can)

Solution 3Local webserver: A custom application

The third solution is somewhat a mix between the first and the second and is my personal favorite. It is basically the hander with an internal webserver so we don't need to start messing in the registry, it will support all types of browsers and we don't need to install a full blown webserver with added php functionality.

The content of this essay covers only some ideas I had with some proof of concept code. This is by far complete, polished or fully bugfree functional code. Feel free to use or abuse as you see fit and build upon the base I have provided here, but remember to share. If you for example created a search bot with a webinterface, a wrapper tool,... or if you adapted and improved the code here or even just ported it to another language (C, Java, ...)

Remarks, suggestions or contributions: just stick them on the ~ S ~ messageboard. I'm sure some interesting discussions and or ideas can come to life there.